Arcadia or
Αρκαδία
A province of Greece in the centre of the Peloponnese. It
took its name from the mythological letter Arcas, while
history in this area records periods from the Roman to
the Byzantine empires, and even a short period under the
Franks before, in the mid 15thcentury, the province was taken by the
Turks. After 400 years of Ottoman rule, Arcadia became
the centre for the Greek struggle for independence.
In mythology, Arcadia is known as the homeland of Pan
“who could be heard playing on the syrinx on the hill of
Mainalos”. According to tradition, the inhabitants of
Arcadia lived a simple but happy pastoral life and were
known for their musicality and their ancient origin, a
pedigree that allegedly went all the way back to the
Moon. They were ascribed strict principles of justice and
rustic hospitality, as well as ignorance and a low
standard of living. Thanks to literature and the fine
arts, the place has for millennia been a symbol of
genuine happiness (Utopia, symbol of the Golden Age)
although the real landscape was described impartially by
the historian Polybius, himself an Arcadian, as “a poor,
bare, rocky and cold land, short of all the amenities of
life and with hardly enough food for a few skinny goats”.
Greek poets thus hesitated to locate their pastoral
poetry in this Arcadia, and some of the scenes of the
most famed among them, in Theocritus’s Idylls for
example, are located in Sicily, full of flowery meadows
and shady groves, to which Pan himself is moved, to
return to the dying Daphnis his shepherd’s pipe. In Latin
poems, particularly in Virgil’s Eclogues, came the first
revolution in the interpretation of Arcadia, in the
direction of its idealisation, mythical truth taking on
contemporary and elegiac sense of transitoriness, and in
the 5th Eclogue comes the first appearance of Daphnis’
grave in Arcadia. After the decline of pastoral poetry in
the Middle Ages, the Italian poet Jacopo Sannazaro was to
bring it to life in his bucolic poem Arcadia of 1504 (or
1502, according to Panofsky), as an emotional experience
and utopian domain modelled on Virgil, but for Sannazaro
this domain is inevitably a lost domain, and his poetry
is replete with the spirit of reminiscence and
melancholy.
In the well-known Latin tag “Et in Arcadia ego” the verb
to be, esse, is missing, which has led to numerous ways
of reading. It has been read as a funeral epitaph,
addressing Death itself: “I too (am) in Arcadia” or “In
Arcadia too there is me”. Then began a way of
interpreting the phrase in a manner inappropriate to
Latin grammar, putting it in the past and in the first
person: “I too was once in Arcadia”, which has been
retained until this day, achieving prominence in later
literature, in, for example, the first verses of
Schiller’s poem “Resignation”: “Auch ich war in Arcadian
geboren”.
The first setting of the inscription and topic from this
point of view can be seen in paintings of the same name
of the master of the Italian Baroque, Francesco Guercino
(1621-23, Rome, National Gallery), which also represents
the already mentioned transformation of the theme of the
idyll into the theme of memento mori, a reference to the
transitoriness of life, a meaning very close to the
spirit of the Baroque. The best known examples of this
still widespread interpretation of the phrase are two
versions of the topic “Shepherds in Arcadia” by Poussin
(one of 1627, now in the Devonshire Collection,
Chatsworth, and the second, with the title of “Les
bergers d’ Arcadie” of 1645-46, in the Louvre). In the
fine arts the topic was to take on new interpretations,
as shown convincingly in his study by Erwin Panofsky, all
the way down to the Rococo (Watteau, Boucher and
Fragonard), sounding there as less of a moralising
warning, and more as an utopian, consolatory promise: “In
death too there is Arcadia”.

References:
Panofsky,
Erwin: Meaning in the Visual Arts. University of Chicago
Press, 1955/1993